Labour in Irish History

by James Connolly

There is a class of Revolutionists
named Girondins whose fate in history is remarkable enough. Men
who rebel, and urge the lower classes to rebel, ought to have
other than formulas to go upon. Men who discern in the misery of
the toiling, complaining millions, not misery but only a raw
material which can be wrought upon and traded in for one's own
poor hide-bound theories and egoisms, to whom millions of living
fellow-creatures with beating hearts in their bosoms -- beating,
suffering, hoping -- are `masses', mere explosive masses, for
blowing down Bastilles with, for voting at hustings for `us', such
men are of the questionable species.
-- Thomas Carlyle.

The outbreak of the famine, which commenced
on a small scale in 1845, and increased in area and intensity until
1849, brought to a head the class antagonism in Ireland, of which
the rupture with the trades was one manifestation, and again
revealed the question of property as the test by which the public
conduct is regulated, even when those men assume the garb of
revolution. Needless to say, this is not the interpretation of the
history of that awful period we are given by the orthodox Irish or
English writers upon the subject. Irish Nationalists of all stripes
and English critics of every variety agree, with wonderful
unanimity, in ascribing a split in the Repeal Association which led
to the formation by the seceders of the body known as the Irish
Confederation to the academic question of whether force might or
might not be employed to achieve a political end. The majority of
the Repeal Association, we are told, subscribed to the principle
enunciated by O'Connell that `the greatest sublunary blessings were
not worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood', and John
Mitchel, Father Meehan, Gavan Duffy, Thomas Francis Meagher, Devin
Reilly, William Smith O'Brien, Fintan Lalor, and others repudiated
that doctrine, and on this point of purely theoretical divergence
the secession from O'Connell took place. It is difficult to believe
that any large number of Irishmen ever held such a doctrine
seriously; it is quite certain that the Irish Catholic priesthood,
O'Connell's chief lieutenants, did not hold nor counsel such a
doctrine during the Tithe War. O'Connell himself had declared that
he would willingly join in helping England in `bringing down the
American eagle in its highest pride of flight', which surely would
have involved war, and in the House of Commons on one occasion, in
reply to Lord Lyndhurst, who had characterised the Irish as `aliens
in blood, in language, and in religion', Richard Lalor Shiel, a
champion of O'Connellism, had delivered a magnificent oration
vaunting the prowess of Irish soldiers in the English army. In
passing we note that Shiel considered the above phrase of Lord
Lyndhurst an insult; modern Irish Nationalists triumphantly assert
the idea, embodied in that phrase, as the real basis of Irish
nationalism.

Nor yet were the seceders, the Young
Irelanders as they were called, in favour of physical force, save as
a subject for flights in poetry and oratory. In reality the
secession took place on a false issue; the majority on either side
being disinclined to admit, even if they recognised, the real issue
dividing them. That issue was the old and ever-present one of the
Democratic principle in human society versus the
Aristocratic. The Young Irelanders, young and enthusiastic, felt the
force of the Democratic principle then agitating European society,
indeed the very name of Young Ireland was an adaptation of the names
used by the Italian revolutionist Mazzini for the revolutionary
associations, Young Italy, Young Switzerland, Young France, and
Young Germany, he founded after the year 1831. And as the progress
of the revolutionary movement on the Continent, (accompanied as it
was by the popularisation of Socialistic ideas among the
revolutionary masses) synchronised with the falling apart of the
social system in Ireland owing to the famine, the leaders of the
Young Ireland party responded to and moved along with the
revolutionary current of events without ever being able to
comprehend the depth and force of the stream upon whose surface they
were embarked. The truth of this is apparent to all who study their
action when at last the long talked of day-for-revolution had
arrived. By that time, 1848, Ireland was in the throes of the
greatest famine in her history.

A few words explanatory of that famine may
not be amiss to some of our readers. The staple food of the Irish
peasantry was the potato; all other agricultural produce, grains and
cattle, was sold to pay the landlord's rent. The ordinary value of
the potato crop was yearly approximately twenty million pounds in
English money; in 1848, in the midst of the famine the value of
agricultural produce in Ireland was £44,958,120. In that year the
entire potato crop was a failure, and to that fact the famine is
placidly attributed, yet those figures amply prove that there was
food enough in the country to feed double the population, were the
laws of capitalist society set aside, and human rights elevated to
their proper position. It is a common saying amongst Irish
Nationalists that `Providence sent the potato blight; but England
made the famine.' The statement is true, and only needs amending by
adding that `England made the famine by a rigid application of the
economic principles that lie at the base of capitalist society.' No
man who accepts capitalist society and the laws thereof can
logically find fault with the statesmen of England for their acts in
that awful period. They stood for the rights of property and free
competition, and philosophically accepted their consequences upon
Ireland; the leaders of the Irish people also stood for the rights
of property, and refused to abandon them even when they saw the
consequences in the slaughter by famine of over a million of the
Irish toilers. The first failure of the potato crop took place in
1845, and between September and December of that year 515 deaths
from hunger were registered, although 3,250,000 quarters of wheat
and numberless cattle had been exported. From that time until 1850
the famine spread, and the exports of food continued. Thus in 1848
it was estimated that 300,000 persons died of hunger and 1,826,132
quarters of wheat and barley were exported. Typhus fever, which
always follows on the heels of hunger, struck down as many as
perished directly of famine, until at last it became impossible in
many districts to get sufficient labourers with strength enough to
dig separate graves for the dying. Recourse was had to famine pits,
into which the bodies were thrown promiscuously; whole families died
in their miserable cabins, and lay and rotted there, and travellers
in remote parts of the country often stumbled upon villages in which
the whole population had died of hunger. In 1847, `black '47',
250,000 died of fever; 21,770 of starvation. Owing to the efforts of
emigration agents and remittances sent from relatives abroad in the
same year, 89,783 persons embarked for Canada. They were flying from
hunger, but they could not fly from the fever that follows in the
wake of hunger, and 6,100 died and were thrown overboard on the
voyage, 4,100 died on their arrival in Canada, 5,200 in hospitals,
and 1,900 in interior towns.

Great Britain was nearer than America, and
many who could not escape to America rushed to the inhospitable
shores of Britain; but pressure was brought to bear upon the
steamship companies, and they raised the rates upon all passengers
by steerage to an almost prohibitive price. In this flight to
England occurred one of the most fearful tragedies of all history, a
tragedy which, in our opinion, surpasses that of the Black Hole of
Calcutta in its accumulation of fearful and gruesome horrors. On
December 2, 1848, a steamer left Sligo with 200 steerage passengers
on board bound for Liverpool. On that bleak north-western coast such
a passage is at all times rough, and storms are both sudden and
fierce. Such a storm came on during the night, and as the unusual
number of passengers crowded the deck the crew unceremoniously and
brutally drove them below decks, and battened down the hatches to
prevent their re-emergence. In the best of weather the steerage of
such a coasting vessel is, even when empty of human freight, foul,
suffocating and unbearable; the imagination fails to realise what it
must have been on that awful night when 200 poor wretches were
driven into its depths. To add to the horror, when some of the more
desperate beat upon the hatches and demanded release, the mate, in a
paroxysm of rage, ordered tarpaulin to be thrown across the opening
to stifle their cries. It did stifle the cries, it also excluded the
air and the light, and there in that inferno those 200 human beings
fought, struggled and gasped for air while the elements warred
outside and the frail tub of a ship was tossed upon the surface of
the waters. At last, when some one stronger than the rest managed to
break through and reach the deck, he confronted the ship's officers
with the news that their brutality had made them murderers, that
grim death was reaping his harvest amongst the passengers. It was
too true. Out of the 200 passengers battened down below decks, 72,
more than a third of the entire number, had expired, suffocated for
want of air or mangled to death in the blind struggle of despair in
the darkness. Such is the tale of that voyage of the ship
`Londonderry', surely the most horrible tale of the sea in the
annals of any white people!

Amidst such conditions the Irish
Confederation had been preaching the moral righteousness of
rebellion, and discoursing learnedly in English to a starving
people, the most of whom knew only Irish, about the historical
examples of Holland, Belgium, Poland, and the Tyrol. A few men,
notably John Mitchel, James Fintan Lalor, and Thomas Devin Reilly,
to their credit be it said, openly advocated, as the first duty of
the people, the refusal to pay rents, the retention of their crops
to feed their own families, and the breaking-up of bridges and
tearing-up of railroad lines, to prevent the removal of food from
the country. Had such advice been followed by the Young Irelanders
as a body it would, as events showed, have been enthusiastically
adopted by the people at large, in which event no force in the power
of England could have saved landlordism or the British Empire in
Ireland. As explained by Fintan Lalor, the keenest intellect in
Ireland in his day, it meant the avoidance of all pitched battles
with the English army, and drawing it into a struggle along lines
and on a plan of campaign where its discipline, training, and
methods would be a hindrance rather than a help, and where no
mobilisation, battalion-drilling nor technical knowledge of military
science was required of the insurgent masses. In short, it involved
a social and a national revolution, each resting upon the other. But
the men who advocated this were in a hopeless minority, and the
chiefs of the Young Irelanders were as rabidly solicitous about the
rights of the landlord as were the chiefs of the English Government.
While the people perished, the Young Irelanders talked, and their
talk was very beautiful, thoroughly grammatical, nicely polished,
and the proper amount of passion introduced always at the proper
psychological moment. But still the people perished. Eventually the
Government seized upon the really dangerous man -- the man who had
hatred of injustice deeply enough rooted to wish to destroy it at
all costs, the man who had faith enough in the masses to trust a
revolutionary outbreak to their native impulses, and who possessed
the faculty of combining thought with action, John Mitchell. With
his arrest the people looked for immediate revolution, so did the
Government, so did Mitchel himself. All were disappointed. John
Mitchel was carried off to penal servitude in Van Diemen's Land
(Tasmania) after scornfully refusing to sign a manifesto presented
to him in his cell by Thomas Francis Meagher and others, counselling
the people not to attempt to rescue him. The working class
of Dublin and most of the towns were clamouring for their leaders to
give the word for a rising; in many places in the country the
peasantry were acting spontaneously. Eventually news reached Dublin
in July, 1848, that warrants were issued for the arrest of the
chiefs of the Young Ireland party. They determined to appeal to the
country. But everything had to be done in a `respectable' manner;
English army on one side, provided with guns, bands, and banners;
Irish army on the other side, also provided with guns, bands and
banners, `serried ranks with glittering steel', no mere proletarian
insurrection, and no interference with the rights of property. When
C. G. Duffy was arrested on Saturday, 9th of July, in Dublin, the
Dublin workers surrounded the military escort on the way to the
prison at Newgate, stopped the carriage, pressed up to Duffy and
offered to begin the insurrection then and there. `Do you wish to be
rescued'? said one of the leaders. `Certainly not', said Duffy. And
the puzzled toilers fell back and allowed the future Australian
Premier to go to prison. In Cashel, Tipperary, Michael Doheny was
arrested. The people stormed the jail and rescued him. He insisted
upon giving himself up again and applied for bail. In Waterford
Meagher was arrested. As he was being taken through the city,
guarded by troops, the people erected a barricade in the way across
a narrow bridge over the River Suir, and when the carriage reached
the bridge some cut the traces of the horses and brought the
cavalcade to a standstill. Meagher ordered them to remove the
barricade; they begged him to give the word for insurrection and
they would begin then and there. The important city was in their
hands, but Meagher persisted in going with the soldiers, and the
poor working-class rebels of Waterford let him go, crying out as
they did so, `You will regret it, you will regret it, and it is your
own fault'. Meagher afterwards proved himself a fearless soldier of
a regular army, but as an insurgent he lacked the necessary
initiative.

But the crowning absurdity of all was the
leadership of William Smith O'Brien. He wandered through the country
telling the starving peasantry to get ready, but refusing to allow
them to feed themselves at the expense of the landlords who had so
long plundered, starved, and evicted them; he would not allow his
followers to seize upon the carts of grain passing along the roads
where the people were dying of want of food; at Mullinahone he
refused to allow his followers to fell trees to build a barricade
across the road until they had asked permission of the landlords who
owned the trees; when the people of Killenaule had a body of
dragoons entrapped between two barricades he released the dragoons
from their dangerous situation upon their leader assuring him that
he had no warrant for his (O'Brien's) arrest; in another place he
surprised a party of soldiers in the Town Hall with their arms taken
apart for cleaning purposes, and instead of confiscating the arms,
he told the soldiers that their arms were as safe as they would be
in Dublin Castle.

When we remember the state of Ireland then,
with her population perishing of famine, all the above recital reads
like a page of comic opera. Unfortunately it is not; it is a page
from the blackest period of Ireland's history. Reading it, we can
understand why Smith O'Brien has a monument in Dublin, although
Fintan Lalor's name and writings have been boycotted for more than
fifty years. W. A. O'Connor, B.A., in his History of the Irish
People, sums up Smith O'Brien's career thus: -- `The man had
broken up a peaceful organisation in the cause of war, promised war
to a people in desperate strait, went into the country to wage war,
then considered it guilt to do any act of war'. It must, of course,
be conceded that Smith O'Brien was a man of high moral probity, but
it is equally necessary to affirm that he was a landlord, vehemently
solicitous for the rights of his class, and allowing his solicitude
for those rights to stand between the millions of the Irish race and
their hopes of life and freedom. It ought, however, also be
remembered, in extenuation of his conduct in that awful crisis, that
he had inherited vast estates as the result of the social, national,
and religious apostacy of his forefathers, and in view of such an
ancestry, it is more wonderful that he had dreamed of rebellion than
that he had repudiated revolution.

Had Socialist principles been applied to
Ireland in those days not one person need have died of hunger, and
not one cent of charity need have been subscribed to leave a smirch
upon the Irish name. But all except a few men had elevated landlord
property and capitalist political economy to a fetish to be
worshipped, and upon the altar of that fetish Ireland perished. At
the lowest computation 1,225,000 persons died of absolute hunger;
all of these were sacrificed upon the altar of capitalist thought.

Early in the course of the famine the
English Premier, Lord John Russell, declared that nothing must be
done to interfere with private enterprise or the regular course of
trade, and this was the settled policy of the Government from first
to last. A Treasury Minute of August 31, 1846, provided
that `depots for the sale of food were to be established at Longford,
Banagher, Limerick, Galway, Waterford, and Sligo, and subordinate
depots at other places on the western coast', but the rules provided
that such depots were not to be opened where food could be obtained
from private dealers, and, when opened, food was to be sold at
prices which would permit of private dealers competing. In all the
Acts establishing relief works, it was stipulated that all the
labour must be entirely unproductive, so as not to prevent
capitalists making a profit either then or in the future. Private
dealers made fortunes ranging from £40,000 to £80,000. In 1845 a
Commissariat Relief Department was organised to bring in Indian Corn
for sale in Ireland, but none was to be sold until all private
stores were sold out: the State of Massachusetts hired an
American ship-of-war, the Jamestown, loaded it with grain,
and sent it to Ireland; the Government placed the cargo in storage,
claiming that putting it on the market would disturb trade. A Poor
Relief Bill in 1847 made provision for the employment of
labour on public works, but stipulated that none should be employed
who retained more than a quarter of an acre of land; this induced
tens of thousands to surrender their farms for the sake of a bite to
eat, and saved the landlords all the trouble and expense of
eviction. When this had been accomplished to a sufficient extent
734,000 persons were discharged, and as they had given up their
farms to get employment on the works they were now as helpless as
men on a raft in mid-ocean. Mr. Mulhall, in his Fifty Years of
National Progress, estimates the number of persons evicted
between 1838 and 1888. as 3,668,000; the greater number of these saw
their homes destroyed during the years under consideration, and this
Poor Relief Bill, nick-named an `Eviction-Made-Easy-
Act', was one main weapon for their undoing. In 1846, England,
hitherto a Protectionist country, adopted Free Trade, ostensibly in
order to permit corn to come freely and cheaply to the starving
Irish. In reality, as Ireland was a corn and grain exporting
country, the measure brought Continental agricultural produce to
England into competition with that of Ireland, and hence, by
lowering agricultural prices, still further intensified the misery
of the Irish producing classes. The real meaning of the measure was
that England, being a manufacturing nation, desired to cheapen food
in order that its wage- slaves might remain content with low wages,
and indeed one of the most immediate results of free trade in
England was a wholesale reduction of the wages of the manufacturing
proletariat.

The English capitalist class, with that
hypocrisy that everywhere characterises the class in its public
acts, used the misery of the Irish as a means to conquer the
opposition of the English landlord class to free trade in grains,
but in this, as in every other measure of the famine years, they
acted consistently upon the lines of capitalist political economy.
Within the limits of that social system and its theories their acts
are unassailable and unimpeachable; it is only when we reject that
system, and the intellectual and social fetters it imposes, that we
really acquire the right to denounce the English administration of
Ireland during the famine as a colossal crime against the human
race. The non-socialist Irish man or woman who fumes against that
administration is in the illogical position of denouncing an effect
of whose cause he is a supporter. That cause was the system of
capitalist property. With the exception of those few men we have
before named, the Young Ireland leaders of 1848 failed to rise to
the grandeur of the opportunity offered them to choose between human
rights and property rights as a basis of nationality, and the
measure of their failure was the measure of their country's
disaster.